Least extreme biophysics phd

I think gene theraly is a miracle technology that should absolutely be explored more. The thing is, we're already at a point where we can do it in adults. So doing it on embyros, which can't consent, is simply an uncessasary moral hazard.
That said, I think the doctor here sort of has a point, which is that medical research is sometimes so concerned with doing no harm that it allows harm to happen without trying to treat it.

I'd like to get in to genetic engineering. When I came across his story while researching crispr, I sympathized with him. He did the experiment in what to me is a moral way. Just going on memory it was like 'take 4 embryos, edit two, keep parents in the loop and ask which embryo they want'. Complain all you want, but he did no wrong; it's the public and system that then wronged him. So yeah, of nearly anyone, he is the one who most gets to say 'ethics ruining science'. It's ironic because there are tons and tons of unethical science activities done literally every day. But for those to be ignored and instead ethics police to hit him when he did all his stuff morally and resulted probably in two extrahealthy kids... Yeah I agree with him. I think everything should be done morally, but if he is going to be hit like that under the guise of 'ethics' then nah. 'ethics' needs to be replaced by morals and decency. Literally horrifically murdering people (war) is legal and accepted while him using science, AND CORRECTLY, to protect people from liferuining diseases got the treatment it did? nah. I hope he continues growing and doing more genetic engineering and this time doesn't share a single thing with the public. He should never give the people that treated him like that a single piece of data. There are ways to bypass the patent thickets if he isn't selling what he does, especially if he shares no info about it. I support him.
prepares for 200 downvotes

my type of guy. And he still does his research to help people even with the public treating him like it does.

Dr He's dream of baby gladiators cannot be hindered by whiny-don't-make-the-babies-fight so-called "ethics"!
Imagine what the world has lost

Watch Star Trek

I think a really exceeding important clarification here is he edited the genomes of human embryos, not babies. Babies are already born humans, embryos are a clump of cells that will become a baby in the future. I do not condone gene editing without consent, which is what he did, and yes there is lots of questionable ethics around gene editing but he did NOT experiment on babies. This should be made clear especially in a science based community, memes or not.
Implying that babies are the same thing as embryos is fundamentally incorrect, in the same way a caterpillar is not a butterfly and a larva is not a fly, the distinction is very important.
EDIT To add further detail - One of the reasons this is so unethical is that he experimented on human embryos that were later born and became babies. His intent was always to create a gene edited human, but the modifications were done while they were embryos, not live babies.
- Seems like splitting hairs, at best, for you to claim the three edited human babies who were born from this experiment aren't part of the experiment. He fully aimed to study them and they are still being scientifically monitored.
  He also had a bizarre contract he made the parents sign that if they changed their minds they had to reimburse him the financial costs of the experiment.
- I have talked to some Americans who claims that sperm + egg = baby and I want to place an egg in front of them and ask them what it is and if they say anything other than a chicken, I will laugh.
  Also, thank you for the distinction. Kind of insane to call embryos babies. It is shit like this that makes me feel like my brain is shrinking when I talk to some people online.
  
  They became babies when they were born with experimental modified genomes without their consent
- I understand what you're saying, but his experiment allowed the embryos to come to term and be born as human babies. Scientists have worked with human embryos before and avoided similar outcry by not allowing them to develop further (scientific outcry, not religious). Calling his work an experiment on human embryos ignores the fact that he always intended for his work to impact the real lives of real humans who would be born.
  
  Real humans who would be born and could potentially have children, passing whatever genetic edits they have (intended and off-target) into the gene pool.
  
  I totally agree, I do believe what he did was unethical and criminal.
  I also believe the clarification on if the experimenting was done on live human babies or if it was done on human embryos is exceeding important. Implying that this was done on live human babies is basically misinformation. Just look at the rest of this thread and how people are talking about this, everyone is discussing this as if its was living, breathing, crying babies that were experimented on, not a clump of cells before they have any type of living functionality.
  If anything what you said should be included, he experimented on embryos with the intent of them being born and becoming babies. But it most definitely should not be "he carried out medical experiments on babies", because that is patently untrue.
  
  By all accounts what he did worked. The potential to end HIV is huge. The amount of human suffering that could be reduced by rolling out what he did is very real.
  The technology is here. It's better to strictly manage it for the public good than to lock it away.

I think the only thing that deserves clarification is if he broke ethics to do biomedical research. It sure seems he did. There's ethics approval in any study for a good reason.

Mengele vibes right there.
- That borders on Holocaust denial to even try and compare the two
- Well, the nazis did make a lot of scientific progress…
  /s, just in case
  
  I am pretty sure that NASA would unjokingly agree with you on that.
  
  The nazis were ethical compared to what was happening at Unit 731...

"Speed limits are holding me back from getting from a to B in as little time as possible" yeah, and they reduce the likelihood of injuring/killing a people in the process.
- yeah, but, consider: I really want to get to point B. like, so badly. and I'm pretty sure I'm a good driver.

Ethics are supposed to throttle human activity. That's their fucking job. That guy is a goddamn sociopath.
- not necessarily throttle, but divert into more ethical directions.
  the nazi twin 'experiments' for example, were monstrous but produced like no useful data.
  atrocities do not necessarily mean better science. sometimes you're just being an edgelord.
- I honestly think that is the most important point to make. It is a fundamental truth and force the person to talk specifics. Why is it bad there?
- I thought this guy was the one doing the human throttling
  
  No he used crispr to give babies HIV resistance.
  People on the side of classical ethics say the outcome was unknown so manipulating the embryo was wrong (ie maybe it makes them more likely to have a birth defect or something else wrong with them). Others might say "an embryo isn't a person" or "the risk was low and the gain was high" but unfortunately he also didn't tell anyone so.
  There's also the fake "ethics" where people claim humans have more inherent value than chimps or mice, which of course we do not. Unfortunately this false platform is where a lot of the arguments are based: humans special, so we can't manipulate their genome before birth. Once they are born of course these kids would get HIV and die, or be sent to work in a suicide (apple) factory, or help murder Uyghurs...but god forbid you experiment on people that's bad.
  I'm on the side of he shouldn't have done things the way he did, but there are hiv-resistant babies and we know how to make them now and it's easy.
- But there is probably a lot of wiggle room between what we have currently and stitching babies together at the skull or whatever people think of.
  We can't have the perfect ethics. And I'm pretty certain company's use ethical limits to limit competition like the do everything else.
- He gave the children of HIV positive fathers, conceived via in vitro fertilization, resistance to HIV. I don't think it's as bad as everyone suspects. I'm not sure children conceived the normal way would have survived.
  
  He didn't give them that though. He just claimed he did.
  
  Hi, I am graduating in biotechnology and my professors discussed this in class. The main points they brought up were:
  1: the technique used for gene editing in those test subjects was and still is not 100% specific. With the correct primers you can still have incorrect breaks in the DNA and incorrect adhesion of your gene of interest, pair of bases can be lost and/or introduced indirectly, causing mutations that range from luckily encoding the same aminoacid to a sequence break, altering all of the following aminoacids and resulting in either a truncated protein that luckily does nothing to a protein that results in who knows what damage to the cell. This is ok in situations where you're changing just a few calls inside or outside of the body, but when you're changing the genome of an entire person, that is extremely dangerous for no real gain because
  2: the gene he edited was still being studied and was not guaranteed to give them immunity and it turned out they didn't gain immunity to HIV.
  3: there are better ways to guarantee a baby is not born with HIV that are better known, do not involve possibly giving ultra cancer to babies and have been throughout tested before, they did not advance our scientific knowledge and put people's lives in danger for no guaranteed benefit besides his own ego.
  There's a reason why the entire scientific community was against his actions, especially those who work with genetic editing.
  
  The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Just because he's trying to achieve something admirable, that doesn't automatically mean his actions are ethical.

I think he does it ironically tbh, his posts are all over the place, from making fun of Europe for regulating everything to then saying that gene editing should be regulated by international laws to then saying ethics are holding back humanity, then just saying he loves austin texas, then stating that he will not develop bio weapons lmao.
Stanford cup and CPC flag, he does have a sense of humour tbh.

Ooof..

Is nobody concerned that illegal experiments on babies only gets you 3 years?
Maybe they were Uyghurs so it was classified as "property damage" in Chinese law.
- The devil is in the details....
  You are likely thinking (as I am) that he implanted robotic arms on babies but he may have just rubbed sage oil on them for all we know
  
  He used CRISPR to make babies immune to HIV.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Jiankui_affair
  Laws were changed after this incident:
  In 2020, the National People's Congress of China passed Civil Code and an amendment to Criminal Law that prohibit human gene editing and cloning with no exceptions
  So, in case you actually meant that weird ignorant remark you made about Uyghurs, the answer is no and no.
  
  Oh shit someone tell the ~~fascist scum~~ liberal toads that its actually blue on blue, this guy was working for a honky kong universty!!!
  
  Lemmitors downvoting you because actually learning about the case conflicts with their "cHiNa BaD" circlejerk.
  
  It was a joke... You don't get to jail for experimenting with slaves in China.
  
  Thanks for the information -- good to know. I assume that like American law, he couldn't be punished for something that wasn't illegal when he did it?
  Regarding the Uyghur comment the other guy made, definitely a bit tasteless but I don't think it's that ignorant given the genocide China perpetrated against them.
- Be careful, you might get banned from lemmy dot ml for hatespeech against dictatorships.
  
  It's literal misinformation, so it probably should be removed, yes.
  
  Hong kongs a dictatorship? You know, the place this doctor was working?
  Well observed, its been an apartheid state since its inception as a colony to the UK.
  
  I've blocked that instance, but if they need more material to ban me I have it.
  
  Why did you self censor by saying "dot"?
  
  Who cares about a tankie instance?
  
  Everyone who opposes dictatorships is a Nazi or a liberal, who are also Nazis.
- Depends how successful the experiment is (and probably on what the goal is as well).
  If he'd been testing the effects of grass vs grain feed on human fat marbling, I'd imagine the sentence would have been a little more severe
- And China executed a shitload of people for political dissent...
- And in what context medical experiments should be allowed on babies ?
  
  A lot of contexts? Like the development depending on formula vs mother's milk? Experimenting doesn't need to mean vivisection or injecting unregulated drugs, but if you need to do the experiments illegally, I'm not sure it was something "safe"
  
  Yet we still have default circumcisions in the US, no?
  
  Not babies, embyros
- Dang, you can really just pull shit straight out of your ass and people will believe it.
  
  lemmy dot ml

Wasn't he the guy who was trying to find a way for HIV-positive couples to have HIV-negative babies?
- Antiretroviral therapy for pregnant women already is a safe and effective way to avoid HIV transmission to the baby. It's part of standard treatment guidelines https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1701216324003748
  So the guy has genetically engineered babies as a potentially risky and certainlycontroversial solution for a problem that already has a safe and non-controversia solution.

wait he's not a fucking parody account?? i thought he was like. larping as an umbrella corp researcher
- Nah, I'm pretty sure that's the dude that used crispr on some babies years ago in an attempt to make them immune to HIV or something.
  
  I was very surprised to hear that China arrested him for it in the first place

If a person's criticism is of "ethics" in general, that individual should not be allowed in a position of authority or trust. If you have a specific constraint for which you can make a case that it goes too far and hinders responsible science and growth (and would have repeatable, reliable results), then state the specific point clearly and the arguments in your favor.
- So if we put these extra pair of legs on babies then they can stand in more extreme angles making them better at construction at a time when there is a housing shortage
  
  For acceptance in the US we will also add more hands so the baby can hold an AR 15 while doing construction work.
  
  I am convinced, I vote to allow it.
- Best I can do is generalization
- And we already have a safety valve for when conventional ethics is standing in the way of vital research: the researchers test on themselves.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-experimentation_in_medicine
  If it's that vital, surely you would do it to yourself?
  It's not terribly common because most useful research is perfectly ethical, but we have a good number of cases of researchers deciding that there's no way for someone to ethically volunteer for what they need to do, so they do it to themselves. Sometimes they die. Sometimes they make very valuable discoveries. Sometimes both.
  So the next time someone wantz to strap someone to a rocket engine and fire it into a wall, all they have to do is go first and be part of the testing pool.
  
  If it's that vital, surely you would do it to yourself?
  You can't really do the kind of experiments being done genetically modifying growing infants on yourself, I imagine. Not that that should be an excuse, of course.
  
  How exactly are you going to attempt to self genetically modify embryos?

Ironic thing, we already tried this approach multiple times before, specially on war times. And each time humanity concluded that some knowledge has too high a price and we're better off not finding out some things.
Knowledge for the sake of knowledge, especially with a heavy blood cost, isn't the way to progress as a species.
And I should know, as a person greatly defined by curiosity about everything and more limited emotional capacity than other people due to mental limitations.
- Everyone keeps leaning on Unit 731 and the Nazis here.
  What about Tuskegee and syphillis? What about the way that Huvasupai Indians blood was tested without their consent?
  “Fun” fact - the chainsaw was developed to help with child birth. Lots of early US gynecology research was done on enslaved women without pain control.
- If you're talking about unit 731 and the nazis then there was very little, if anything, scientifically valuable there.
  They had terrible research methodology that rendered what data they gathered mostly useless, and even if it wasn't, most of the information could have been surmised by other methods. Some of the things they did served no conceivable practical or scientific purpose whatsoever.
  It was pretty much just sadism with a thin veneer of justification to buy them the small amount of legitimacy they needed to operate within their fascist governments.
  
  From what I read, a tiny bit of radiation and frostbite research was useful. Huge cost, of course, but minimally useful.
  
  Exactly. Society should never conflate knowledge driven by curiosity and knowledge as an excuse for sadism.
  There's a difference between experimenting by following rules, and then observing the results vs giving in to base forbidden desires just to see what happens or trying to bend reality to confirm one's bias - I mean, just look at how people tried to justify until decades ago a black person's 'inferiority' and their discrimination by coming up with all sorts of anatomical observations. That's the danger.
- Also people like him tend to be shit at getting useful data.
- Also the motivation of such research is usually not purely scientific, if at all, so the data gathered is often useless.
- You can critique him all you want but how in the world did you come to the conclusion that his and goals were knowledge for knowledge’s sake?
  
  I have problems with the doctors' way of doing so, but their act was to allow an informed consenting(? it's complicated) couple with an HIV-positive parent to have a child resistant to HIV. It was problematic, yes, but very different to the war crime experiments, much of which was simply about morbid curiosity and torture.

Holy shit, this guy managed to have 3 of the first 10 papers listed on google scholar about his shenanigans.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt.4337

Ethics mean we don't know what the average human male erect penis size is.
No, really. The ethics of the studies say that a researcher can't be in the presence of a sexually aroused erect penis. Having the testee measure their own penis is prone to error. There are ways to induce an erection with an injection, so they use that.
Is the size of an induced erection the same as a sexually aroused erection? Probably in the same ballpark, but we don't really know.
Source: Dr Nicole Prause, neurologist specializing in sexuality, on Holly Randall's podcast.
- Having the testee measure their own penis is prone to error.
  To be fair, testicles aren't designed for that task.
- A quick trip on Google scholar turns up a lot of studies on the size of male erections.
  https://static1.squarespace.com/static/553598c1e4b0a7f854584291/t/55ee4a5ee4b025d99f73150e/1441679966732/Penis+Size+Study+-+Veale+et+al+2015+BJUI.pdf
  It is acknowledged that some of the volunteers across different studies may have taken part in a study because they were more confident with their penis size than the general male population.
  Ha, poisoned data tho
  
  Sure, they exist, but they have the flaws outlined above.
  
  Of course it was biased, those numbers are huge on there, it was men confident in their size skewing the data, at least that's what I will tell myself
- a researcher can’t be in the presence of a sexually aroused erect penis
  Is this some puritan rule? Plenty don't care to flap their erect penis in the faces of some researchers if they asked nicely. What got ethics to do with it when there is consent?
  
  It's not a strict rule, sex science is a thing that can be done with ethical review same as other medical research. the commenter im not sure is giving an accurate picture of this topic.
- Not all erections are sexual-- can't they just measure the non sexy ones?
  
  if only we had some sort of medication specifically designed to cause an erection
- So wait
  Who is telling the truth. My ex said it was too big. The bell curves I've found have said "uh what lmfao no way are you that big" but every self reported study says I'm small
  How the fuck am I going to ever find a toilet that is comfortable to use in my own home
  
  How the fuck am I going to ever find a toilet that is comfortable to use in my own home
  That was an odd segue
  
  Switch from a siphonic toilet bowl to a wash down bowl. You'll get more skid marks, but less dips, splashes and clogging.
- aren't there literally studies about the size that only accepted measurements by medical professionals?
  
  Yes, and they have the problems outlined above.

Do you want BioShock? Cuz this is how you get BioShock
- Or Vault 4.
  
  Eros in the Expanse.

Protogen has entered the chat
- That's actually pretty the whole premise of The Vital Abyss short story. Cortazar explains how he signed up with Protogen and how glad he was to get the nerve staple that removed all empathy from him. Ot, and all the other short stories are worth reading if you liked The Expanse
  
  Made the Eros comparison just a few comments above!
  They were dead anyways (thanks to Protogen releasing the protomolecule), the real tragedy would be to let their deaths be in vain…
- "You're not that guy"
  ...
  "I am that guy 💥"
- owo
  
  not that protogen unfortunately

Not that I support it in any way of course, but he's not wrong. There's probably a lot of medical knowledge to be gained by seeing how the babies he experimented on develop in the future. It's just that the ends don't justify the means.
- It depends on the specifics of the experiment. Throughout the 20th century, the people most keen on unethical medical experiments seemed the least able to design useful experiments. Sometimes people claim that we learned lots from the horrific medical experiments taking place at Nazi concentration camps or Japanese facilities under Unit 731, but at best, it's stuff like how long does it take a horribly malnourished person to die if their organs are removed without anaesthesia or how long does it take a horribly malnourished person who's been beaten for weeks to freeze to death, which aren't much use.
  
  I'm pretty sure that 80% if what we learned from the Nazi/Imperial Japan super unethical experiments was "what can a psychotic doctor justify in order to have an excuse to torture people to death."
  Maybe 20% was arguably useful, and most of that could have been researched ethically with other methods.
  
  “People die if you kill them”
  
  The potential value to the Americans of Japanese-provided data, encompassing human research subjects, delivery system theories, and successful field trials, was immense. However, historian Sheldon H. Harris concluded that the Japanese data failed to meet American standards, suggesting instead that the findings from the unit were of minor importance at best. Harris characterized the research results from the Japanese camp as disappointing, concurring with the assessment of Murray Sanders, who characterized the experiments as "crude" and "ineffective."
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731
  To back up your point that the research gained by unit 731 was useless.
  
  This one was making a child with an HIV-positive parent resistant to HIV, so it's a bit better than 731 torture.
- Eh, usually less than you would expect. We're really good at math and are quite capable of making synthetic experiments where we find people who either require the procedure, or where it's been done incidentally and then inferring the results as though deliberate.
  We can also develop a framework for showing benefit from the intervention, perform the intervention ethically, and then compare that to people who didn't get the intervention after the fact. With proper math you can construct the same confidence as a proper study without denying treatment or intentionally inflicting harm.
  It's how we have evidence that tooth brushing is good for you. It would be unethical to do a study where we believe we're intentionally inflicting permeant dental damage to people by telling them not to brush for an extended period, but we can find people who don't and look at them.
  
  The current context is modifying babies to make them HIV resistant. How would you model something similar without performing the experiment?

Better build a research base on Mars where legal and ethical limitations don't exist. And IDK, start researching teleportation or something.
- Preferably just die because he opened a portal to hell or something.

Testing testing. Running an example instance. Please ignore this OP :>
- Running a lemmy instance on a free ngrok tunnel lmao thats weird
  Seriously tho, save some money and get yourself a domain and a static ip address. It will make things much easier
- I won't ignore this.
- I SEE YOU
  
  GODSPEED 🫡

I know him!!! He featured heavily in that one Walter Isaacson biography, The Codebreaker. About Dr. Doudna of course.
Did he get his PHD? Well, good on him. I see China has a better anti-recidivism program than the USA has. Last I heard, he was doing hard time in Chinese prison for mad scientist stuff.
- He got his PhD in 2010, he was imprisoned 2020 - 2023
  
  Haha, well, that shows my reading comprehension level!
- Listen I'm generally pro rehabilitation but lete not let embezzlers start banks

Damn lol. I'd say call an ambulance for the guy but it looks like he's already in a hospital

Just a dash of Mengele

Average CCP party member

He's right

I know that few really care to know more but the situation is much more complicated than the information given. First of all, similar experiments have been done in china with the scientist being celebrated. The scientist He Jiankui was mostly condemned because of the media and public condemnation. His goal was eliminating HIV in the children of HIV positive parents (something so heavily stigmatized in China that you are ostracized and not even allowed to have a child via sperm washing) and he was successful! His methods were unethical but honestly pretty standard for China and he definitely acted in a manipulative manner towards the parents. But this situation in reality has nothing to do with ethics and everything to do with optics. He was jailed because the ccp cares far more about china looking good than one man. More experiments with even worse ethics continue and you're punished not based on your actions but how people feel when your studies go public.
- Where do you feel Chinese ethics lack compared to American ethics?
- Didn't he only treat one of each set of twins, and used a faulty method that has been supplanted?
  In addition to all the lying and manipulating the parents to get them to agree and not ask many questions.
  
  Sounds right. I'm not an expert but I did a report on him back in college so I've got a a little clear info and a little foggy. He certainly isn't a good guy but he's almost never represented properly which is a shame. He was no mad scientist but if people celebrated his accomplishments they just wouldn't have jailed him.
  That's kind of the way things are done in china imo. It's kind of a trip visiting and hearing residents drinking the koolaid and pretending to drink the koolaid just to stay safe. I've had a few guides with different views on the government. One "extremist" just talked to me about how people are suppressed and the government could be better. Was all about how he'd be locked up and his family doesn't approve of his views. It's a different place.